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Transformative Activism

In Argentina activism is an ongoing process of working on the self and acting on the world.

by SIAN LAZAR

A demonstration in Argentina organized by the Argentine Central Trade Union (Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina), 2012. Photo by Sian Lazar.

In my home country, the UK, we have just come out of a general election. Many of us—including the prime minister who called it—thought that this election would consolidate Conservative power by creating an unassailable majority in the House of Commons. But, although the Tories won the most votes, they actually lost seats, resulting in a hung parliament. This impasse raises plenty of problems and is hardly the most strong and stable outcome, but we have, at least for now, collectively warded off the specter of a one-party state. And it looks as though that achievement in large part came down to the Labour party running an extremely effective campaign: people taking to the streets and knocking on doors to talk to voters, organizing rallies, meetings, discussions, hustings, social media campaigns, and so on. In other words, good old-fashioned activism. Meanwhile, in the US, people are organizing and attending town hall meetings with their representatives; they are protesting at airports and outside courtrooms; they are taking to the streets in enormous numbers to object to President Trump and his policies. Again, good old-fashioned activism. At the same time, in both countries hundreds of everyday campaigns are taking place: for fair wages, fair policing, environmental protection, reproductive rights, clean water, and the list goes on.

What is it that impels people to take up the role of activist?

But what is it that impels people to take up the role of activist, to spend time seeking to persuade others of their cause and to collectively resist the attacks on social life and reproduction wrought by corporate capital and its allies in government? This question is at the heart of my research. I ask it of labor union activists in Argentina, a group of people who have been highly organized since the turn of the 20th century. Over generations, labor unionism has persisted as a vibrant and powerful movement at the heart of Argentine politics, despite being attacked and threatened, at times with lethal force. That persistence is based on many individuals choosing to become activists and to continue organizing in the face of public stigma and state repression. These days the latter tends to take the form of rubber bullets rather than disappearances and such confrontations occur with less frequency than they used to, but activists’ perseverance remains impressive all the same.

My book, The Social Life of Politics, is the culmination of six years of research with trade unionists from the public sector. They are state employees, usually administrative workers in a wide range of institutions, from state-owned theaters, to research centers and hospitals, to government ministries. In trying to find out what made them become labor activists and, crucially, continue to work as activists over many years, I discovered two key terms locals used to describe their political engagement: militancia and contención, or activism and containment. These revealing terms offer insight into how Argentines make themselves political subjects and conceive of their participation in government and political struggle.

Militancia names both the practices of activism as well as the collective of political activists. By studying militancia, we can see how individuals create and understand themselves and others as political actors located in a particular time, place, and family consisting of a specific set of values, dispositions, and orientations. For my interlocutors, those values included having a vocation for political action, anger against injustice, commitment to the collectivity, and love for people and politics. They understood political action as membership in the labor movement, placing themselves in a historical narrative of anarcho-syndicalism (for some) or Peronism (for most), resistance to military dictatorship, and mobilization against structural adjustment and neoliberalism. They considered the values and attributes of vocation, anger, commitment, and love as essential elements of individual character, almost as if they were biological attributes. These were dispositions that could be cultivated by individuals, passed down through generations within families, and called forth or made stronger in activist training sessions.

Over generations, labor unionism has persisted as a vibrant and powerful movement at the heart of Argentine politics.

This calling forth of values such as vocation, love, passion, and so on, happened through collective processes of contención or “containment”—a term with both psychotherapeutic and political registers. Contención derives in part from the concept of therapeutic containment in psychoanalysis, which refers to the ability of the therapist to take on the emotions of the other and process them without being overwhelmed by them. More broadly, containment can be thought of as the process by which the group encompasses the individual, through individual therapeutic relations as well as collective activities of care and political organizing, action, and discussion. These processes of contención create a sense of a collective self—the union—committed to the transformation of society for the better. The two unions I worked with understood the precise content of transformative action differently and engaged in different acts of containment by extension. One union placed great weight on organizational strength and discipline, and the ability to negotiate with employers; the other constructed its collective self as a political project of alternative unionism, summarized through its emphasis on horizontality and autonomy from governing party politics, thereby tapping into trends of political organization prominent in Argentina today.

Activists thus engage in ethical-political projects of subjectivation as individuals and as part of an organized movement. People work on themselves to become particular kinds of characters and to draw out characteristics that they see as essential to themselves. Their sense of rage against injustice might be thought of as inherent, something they were born with—perhaps because one or both parents also felt it and were active in a union or another political group. But this characteristic and others like it could also be brought out through cultivation, by means of participation in the union’s educational programs and daily activities. However, these activities—a street protest or assembly, or the negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement—do not serve solely to create good activists who see themselves as part of the union body working in synch. At the same time that the union is cultivating individual members, it is also acting on the world to transform it: for example to improve salaries or to prevent lay-offs.

Both aspects of activism—working on the self and acting on the world—are interrelated and equally important.

Both aspects of activism—working on the self and acting on the world—are interrelated and equally important, because collective political action that aims to change the world cannot happen without a strong base of everyday organization and collective self-cultivation. Merely being angry at injustice is not sufficient to maintain the hard work of day-to-day activities that are the foundation for revolutionary moments like spectacular mass protests. Anger may not be enough on its own, and needs to be combined with other values, like passion, commitment, and vocation. Those values must be brought out, sustained, and made collective not only through political acts but also through everyday forms of care, sociality, and common action. The lunch to celebrate an activist’s birthday, the ceremony to mark the anniversary of a key figure’s death, the jokes around the table in the union office—all are moments of care and collectivity that build the union as a political actor. This containment helps to make possible the mass street protests and other actions that in turn shape politics at the national level.

Progressive activists in the UK and the US would do well to pay attention to these kinds of everyday, ongoing forms of sociality that bring people together and form the foundation of political movements. Revolutionary moments like the 2011 Occupy movement are vital oxygen for the resistance to capitalism, but our lungs also need to build capacity incrementally through hard work and daily commitment to a cause. Argentine unionists have decades of experience in doing precisely this, as do unionists closer to home. Argentine unions derive strength and longevity by cultivating a collective identity, drawing activists into the fold and containing each other within the group. This everyday, intimate, shared, and familial experience of activism and organization is key, in any context, to fostering enduring political engagement.

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